Even by his own high standards, Patriarch John had preached a fine sermon. It was all about the parable of the talents, and in the Greek of Constantinople. He’d turned it very cleverly to an injunction to give to his relief fund for the distressed churches of Cappadocia. Beyond making sure everyone saw what I dropped into the collecting box when it came past, I’d paid no attention to his use of the parable. I was instead reflecting on how much sense can be found in Scripture – if only you have the patience to look for it.
Martin was going over the fine points again to me and Sveta as we sat in their quarters for an early lunch. The two children played happily at our feet, Maximin looking up every so often to make sure I was still with him.
‘I had that Chief of Police go through the Egyptian quarter last night, and again this morning,’ I explained when Sveta and the children had finally left us alone. ‘He seems to have vanished.’
‘No great loss, if you ask me,’ Martin sniffed. ‘I told you he was dodgy. Didn’t you say he knew the doorman in that place? Well, he was probably in it with the sorcerer and his girl.’
‘That doesn’t explain why Macarius should have chosen simply to disappear,’ I said, ignoring the challenge. ‘No body fitting his description has turned up in any of the usual places – not that I believe he’s the sort of man who could easily be murdered. It’s all most puzzling, and more than a little inconvenient.’
I looked again at the pile of document boxes on the table. Martin had done his usual efficient job in securing every scrap of written material from the house of Leontius. He’d also taken full notes during my second interrogation of the slaves.
‘So what do you think all that stuff means?’ Martin asked, waving at the largest box.
‘We might be able to know if Macarius was at hand,’ I said, lifting out a stack of papyrus. There was sheet after sheet, all covered very neatly in the pseudo-Greek alphabet used nowadays by the Egyptians for writing their own language. I sorted through it and pushed one of the sheets across the table to Martin. ‘This one is in Greek,’ I said, ‘and it may be a translation of something else in the box.’
‘Then shall the breath of Sekhmet roll over the red land and the black; and the men of neither land shall be smitten – yea, the very flesh shall be divided from their bones,’ Martin read. I raised a hand to stop him. There was no point reading more. It was probably all in the same wild and rhapsodic style.
‘Some poem, no doubt, from before the natives took up the Faith,’ I said. ‘If that’s a fair sample of what they write, I’m rather glad not to have learned any Egyptian. You saw from all those ugly antiques in his house that Leontius had an interest in the ancient history of the country. It wouldn’t surprise me if he knew the language.’ I smiled. ‘It wouldn’t much surprise me if it turned out that was what he spoke in private.’ I put the sheets back into their box and replaced the lid. I reached across the table and pulled open one of the boxes where everything was in Greek.
‘Now, we have a problem,’ I explained, returning to our hushed discussion of its contents as we’d wandered back from church. ‘His accounts show that Leontius had liabilities about three times larger than his assets. And some of those liabilities were falling due in the next month or so.’
‘I still don’t follow how so much of what he owed was to you,’ Martin said.
I sighed. I had tried to tell him about the forward contracts. Evidently, I’d failed once again to hack any path through the thicket of his financial ignorance.
‘It seems that his rebuilding expenses in Letopolis were financed by loans from the wealthier landowners,’ I said. ‘Most of his creditors were willing to hold off foreclosing so long as he fronted resistance to the new law. Some of them, however, wanted at least part payment – and even part payment was more than he could manage.’
I took up a letter from a Saracen banking house on the other side of the Red Sea. I waited as Martin read it again, hoping he’d understand the promise of a big payment from some person or persons unknown – but only in October, and on condition he disclosed nothing of the payment in advance. What he was supposed to deliver in return was unstated, but it seemed to have been somewhat more than just keeping me at bay: it may have been goods as much as services. Indeed, there was a certain eagerness that came through the standardised commercial phrasing. I wondered if this might have been the matter that would have concerned me had the man lived.
‘To tide him over,’ I said, dropping the letter back on the table, ‘he entered the financial markets; not a wise move for someone as thick as he appears to have been. My own positions were taken through those Jewish bankers. This should normally have kept me in the clear. You can always trust Jews to keep quiet about who their clients are. But the bankers used by Leontius told him who my people were. That, plus the contract I got Nicetas to award them to handle the customs arrears in Ptolemais, provides at least the ghost of a trail for anyone of intelligence to follow back to me. Leontius wasn’t clever enough to follow the clues. His executors may not be so stupid.’
‘I warned you not to get involved in speculations on the price of bread,’ Martin said, finding something at last he could understand and condemn. ‘When the people learn you’ve been behind the price rises, there will be endless trouble.’
And that – in spite of what I’d told Nicetas and everyone else – is what had me still investigating Leontius. Who had murdered him and why were matters of no importance. What he’d been up to that involved getting me out of Alexandria would normally have been of some importance. What really concerned me, however, was the avoidance of scandal.
‘Martin,’ I said very patiently, ‘I have explained many times that my speculations have been on lower prices come the harvest. I’ve been selling corn in advance at lower prices than others expect, but at much higher prices than I know will be the case. Generally, speculating on future prices has the same effect on those prices as bets on a charioteer have on the speed of his horses. If not, the only effect such speculations can have on present prices is to lower them from what they would otherwise be. If prices are rising at the moment, it’s because the corn is actually running short.’
‘So, if you want the prices to be lower,’ Martin asked, clutching at random words, ‘why did you oppose the price controls?’
I sighed again, and put my thoughts into order. I needed to settle this with Martin. If I could persuade him, I might have an excuse ready for everyone else if the worst came to pass.
‘Martin,’ I said, ‘there will be a good harvest. I’ve already explained how I know this. Therefore, speculating on the fact will tend eventually to release stocks of corn on to the market that would otherwise be stored longer than was needed. Fixing the price by law, on the other hand, will either encourage the people to be less thrifty than they should be, or give merchants reason to withhold stocks from the official market. It will turn shortage into famine.’
Oh dear, I’d lost Martin for sure. He wasn’t stupid, and he always tried to think the best of me. If I couldn’t make myself plain to him, what chance might I have against those landowners in persuading any of the Alexandrian mobs?
Martin opened another of the boxes and took out a document written on parchment. He looked at it and frowned.
‘This is in Persian,’ he said.
I looked. He was right. There was no mistaking those neat squiggles. It had been covered all over the other side in Egyptian writing that may have been a translation. A shame it hadn’t been translated into Greek.
‘I think you should hand all this over to the Intelligence Bureau,’ he said.
I shook my head. Bearing in mind what we knew of these documents, I didn’t fancy having so much as a sniff of their contents pushed under noses that answered to Nicetas.
‘Did you say Priscus would be here in the afternoon?’ Martin asked with a change of subject.
I looked at the furnishings he and Sveta had insisted on bringing out with them from Constantinople. I had told him much better could be picked up for remarkably little in Alexandria. But for all they’d struck me as tatty, and for all the additional carrying cost I’d had to pay, Martin had been too proud of them to think of leaving them behind. He hadn’t changed the subject. Indeed, he’d simply moved the discussion forward.
‘Priscus had me out of bed at dawn,’ I said. ‘He needed a passport and money for a trip to a monastery somewhere off the road to Siwa. He’d heard a rumour that the first chamber pot of Jesus Christ was kept there. I didn’t try disabusing him of this. Since it was at Siwa that I believe Alexander first discovered he was a god, Priscus will surely find something there to keep him happy. He’ll be gone, I rather hope, at least fifteen days.’
‘He went alone?’ Martin asked. ‘He went into Egypt alone?’ he repeated, aghast. ‘He went without guards at a time like this?’
‘He came here alone,’ I said with a shrug. ‘And you’ll not deny that Priscus, still more than Macarius, is not a man easily murdered. Even quite large groups of bandits will take one look at him riding along that road and go off in search of someone else to accost. A shame, I suppose – but there you have it.
‘Now, this leaves a most convenient space in my diary. Priscus is out of Alexandria, and I really need to be in Letopolis. Leontius called a meeting there for later this month of his main associates in the opposition. I know that packet of dirt on me is waiting there. I suspect full details of his financial dealings will be there as well. I did vaguely discuss a trip into Egypt with Nicetas last month. Even if it’s now under six feet of water, it might be useful to look at the land we’re supposed to be dividing. This being so, a trip to Letopolis – not that I plan to advertise it – would be wholly appropriate.
‘Do you fancy coming up river with me?’ I asked with a nonchalant stretch of my arms. I looked over at some faded wall hangings. ‘Taking in the sea voyage to Bolbitine and back, and assuming this north wind holds good for the Nile journey, I reckon we could be back within ten days.’
As Martin opened his mouth to reply, the door flew open…
I rolled off the whore with a long, contented sigh. I took the wine the slave had ready for me, and then I lay back with arms and legs spread out for the eunuch to dab at me with his scented sponge.
I hadn’t taken up the bawd’s offer of the two boys he’d just brought in from the south: ‘Twin brothers,’ he’d said with a smack of his decidedly flabby lips, ‘fully thirteen and well-developed, but still not a hair on their ebony bodies.’
I’d been tempted, mind you. But women do have their uses – or they do when they aren’t waddling about a room screaming at you and smashing any piece of ceramic within reach. I thought of Sveta again and shuddered. For once, I hadn’t bothered with the usual precautions. I should have realised she’d be listening outside the door instead of attending to her duties, whatever these might have been. I’d escaped with a fig juice stain on my sleeve, but my dignity more or less intact. I didn’t care to think what horrors Martin had faced once I was back in the peace and order of my office.
Still, scream as she would, she knew that I was the boss. I’d said a trip into Egypt, and a trip into Egypt there would be. In my office, I’d issued the necessary orders. Soon, there were the passports in the purple ink of the Viceroy’s staff, and letters of instruction. Macarius would have been faster and more comprehensive than the low-level secretaries I’d set to work. But I couldn’t think of anything more than we’d finally settled. It would be the dawn packet to Bolbitine, and then a swift sailing boat up the Nile.
We’d not be going far enough up river to see the Pyramids. They were a good twenty miles south of Letopolis, and I didn’t trust myself to go looking at them and still be back here before Priscus. Even so, it really would be interesting to see something of the country we’d been reading about and reapportioning for months now. I’d spent the remainder of the afternoon with Hermogenes in the Library, reading up what little he still could find of the history and general situation of Lower Egypt.
‘Has My Lord had time to study the documents I sent over the other day?’ he’d asked with a significant glance at the statue of Alexander.
‘They must wait for my return,’ I’d said, making sure to thank him for his diligence in going through so many of those boxes of as yet undestroyed books. If the jumbled mass of literature he had in the basement was any indication of the reserve stock in Soteropolis, it might even be worth diverting all effort from the canal to my work of excavation. Best not, though. Nicetas had recently woken up to the canal project, and was oddly interested in the ability to move warships from the Cyprus station into the Red Sea.
The whore stirred and looked up at me with the dreamy look of a confirmed opium eater. I gave one of her nipples a hard pinch. She grunted and rolled over on to her side. ‘It’s like fucking a corpse,’ I’d complained after our first encounter. But I’d found Luella was herself very like opium – a taste slowly acquired, but long appreciated. So long as you made sure to ask very clearly, she always gave exactly what was wanted. And she never plagued me with any of that chatter you get in bed even from slave women. Oh, she’d cry a bit when the poppy juice wasn’t up to strength. It was then she’d rock backward and forward, the lamplight bouncing with every sob from the whip scars on her back. Apart from that, she was ideal evening entertainment.
For the moment, though, I’d worn her out – that is, she’d gone beyond submissive and was now verging on the comatose. I looked up at the eunuch.
‘Do ask your master,’ I said, ‘if those black twins are still on offer.’
He nodded, going into a fawning speech about the delights kept ever waiting for persons of my quality.
‘Excellent,’ I cut in. ‘Do remind him I know if flesh has been shaved or plucked.’ I wasn’t going that far south. Even so, it did no harm to continue my education in southerly matters.
As the door closed behind the eunuch, I took out some silver from my purse.
‘One is for you,’ I said to the slave. ‘And do try to persuade Luella not to spend everything at the drug stall. She really does need to put something aside for buying her freedom.’